RFC: "-exit" option for find(1)

[Peter Pentchev]

On Fri, Jul 16, 2004 at 11:58:07AM +0400, Denis Antrushin wrote:
> Alfred Perlstein wrote:
> >I'm up too late, this doesn't work because find returns
> >success whenever it successfully runs thought everything.
> >
> >Perhaps the primary change to just "-exit" which would
> >make find exit successfully, and if the primary is never
> >encountered (ie. our find logic never hits it) find would
> >exit with a non-zero exit status?
> >
> >Ideas?  Better ideas?
> >
> >The reason I want this is to avoid extracting a tarball
> >over a directory that has files in it that are newer than
> >the tarball.
> >
> >Neither tar nor find seem to make this easy...
> What about this:
> 
> test -n "`find . -type f -newer ../src.tar.gz`" && echo hi

I believe Alfred's problem with this is that it will still traverse the
whole hierarchy even after a match is found.  In some cases, the
hierarchy may be huge, and if the match is within the first 100-200
files, well... :)

I wonder if it wouldn't be a bit better to add to find(1) something like
-maxmatches N, similar to Alfred's idea, but not limited to a single
match?

G'luck,
Peter

-- 
Peter Pentchev	roam at ringlet.net    roam at sbnd.net    roam at FreeBSD.org
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